Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

The killer, Walter predicted, would be a low achiever in his late thirties, unkempt, stuck in the old neighborhood, working at a menial job, living with his mother. Walter’s profile explained why Terri Brooks let her killer in a locked door after 1:30 in the morning.

“She knew and trusted him,” Walter said. “It was her boyfriend.”

The fourth type of killer he was not prepared to discuss. “It’s the most complex and diabolical, the most difficult type of killer to catch, the greatest of human nightmares. It’s the black hole at the end of the continuum.”

Riding through the stone gate of Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in his black sedan, Fleisher was happy the boy was moving up in the world. Around him were the immense tombs and obelisks of the great and notable: Charles Duryea, who invented the gasoline engine; gospel singer Marion Williams; Roaring Twenties tennis star Bill Tilden. The mausoleums of the wealthy towered over the simple stones and crosses of the masses. Through the good offices of undertaker Craig Mann, whose father buried the boy the first time, Fleisher and the Vidocq Society had secured from the Ivy Hill cemetery prime real estate near the gate for the boy, a place among the favored dead.

He should be here in hallowed ground, Fleisher thought, with other children.

It was November 11, 1998, Veterans Day. The morning sky was dark and brooding. It had rained all night on the hills of the nineteenth-century graveyard, darkening the stones and cenotaphs. The old detectives in dark coats and fedoras gathered around the fresh hole in the ground. Among them were Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen; the young policemen of the winter of 1957 were disguised now as old men. A large black headstone, carved with a lamb symbolizing innocence, stood on the prominent new gravesite. The new burial plot and stone were donated, and the Vidocq Society paid for the reburial at Ivy Hill.

The small casket was a pearly white with a beveled lid. Weinstein, who carried the body to the police car long ago, now joined Fleisher in bearing the coffin from the hearse to the grave. A bag-pipe wailed “Going Home,” the old Negro spiritual:

Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home…

It’s not far, jes’ close by,

Through an open door…

Mother’s there spectin’ me,

Father’s waitin’ too;

Lots o’ folks gather’d there,

All the friends I knew.

Fleisher placed the casket on the hydraulic platform. Now the boy lay as close to the sun as he had been since 1957. His only family was two generations of cops.

The old stone, HEAVENLY FATHER, BLESS THIS UNKNOWN BOY, had been set in the foreground of the new one at Ivy Hill.

Fleisher wept.

The commissioner moved to a makeshift podium and tried to compose himself. More than a hundred people stood around the grave, including District Attorney Abraham and an executive from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from Washington, D.C. The media people stood at a distance across the road. In the crowd was a fifty-one-year-old woman nobody knew. She held a bouquet of blue carnations from the children who rode the schoolbus she drove. “I was ten when it happened, and I never forgot him,” said Rita O’Vary. “The poor little guy. Somebody has to know who he is.”

The old cops sat in folding chairs before the coffin. The clouds broke. Sun bathed the grove of rhododendrons and oak, and the cops said it was a good omen.

Fleisher reminded himself of the reasons to be hopeful. The reburial was only part of their effort, only the beginning. Hundreds of new leads had poured in since America ’s Most Wanted aired the special show on the Boy in the Box. Host John Walsh had revealed Bender’s speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like.

Eight days earlier, the Vidocq Society’s lawyers obtained a court order to allow exhumation of the boy from his grave in Potter’s Field near Mechanicsville and Dunks Ferry roads in northeast Philadelphia, and to move him ten miles to the historic Ivy Hill Cemetery. A backhoe had lumbered up to the grave in Potter’s Field, and, after the stone was removed, opened the grave deep enough for the diggers with shovels, who scraped down to the lid of the coffin, then worked wide straps under the coffin. The backhoe lifted the boy’s coffin out of the earth for the first time in forty-one years. The diggers cleared dirt from the coffin, and carried it into the back of a waiting ambulance. The FBI’s evidence recovery team had done its work.

A woman from the neighborhood, in her fifties, had walked sadly away. She had come to watch, to let the boy know “we didn’t forget.” She was ten when the boy was found, and prayed for him her whole life. Like a lot of neighbors, she left flowers and toys. She thought of the boy as her little brother.

The ambulance drove to the morgue. The coffin was set on a worktable in the medical examiner’s office. As Kelly watched the lid being pried off, he thought, Rem Bristow should be here. Kelly crossed himself when he saw, remarkably, the boy after forty years had not been reduced to dust. Such preservation was seen by ancient Christians as a sign of the Almighty. The boy was a small pile of bones within the rags of the suit a detective’s son had long ago donated. A technician worked through the pile of dust and bones and found a tooth. It would be tested for DNA. With the boy’s DNA soon in hand, if a suspect or family member emerged, they could learn, at last, the boy’s name-and the name of his killer.

The new black stone said, AMERICA ’S UNKNOWN CHILD.

Fleisher said the boy was “a symbol of our nation’s abused children, missing children, and murdered children. We are validating this little boy’s life. Our mission is to go forward from this day and put a name on that tombstone.” A priest, a pastor, and a rabbi commended the boy’s soul to God. Weinstein, seventy-two years old, stood and described finding the boy’s body on February 25, 1957.

“I saw all his pain and his suffering and his anguish,” he said. “It was as though he was speaking to me: ‘What happened? Why?’ And that was an answer I couldn’t give.” In a faltering voice, Weinstein said the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer-“in the world which will be renewed… He will give life to the dead… and raise them to eternal life.”

As the hydraulic groaned and the little coffin disappeared into the ground, Weinstein snapped to attention and gave the boy a military salute. Then he hugged a police sergeant, and then gripped Fleisher as if he would fall.

Kelly’s prayer was simple: Dear God, what more can I do? Tell me and I will do it.

As the sun illuminated the little grove of fresh earth, Weinstein sat in a folding chair with his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.

“C’mon, Sam,” Fleisher whispered as they held on to each other. “We’ll solve it.”

Fleisher had told the stonecutter to leave room on the serpentine black surface for a name.

As if the murder of Terri Brooks had happened only yesterday, Detective Sergeant Cloud started the case at the beginning, visiting her father and stepmother at their home in Warminster. George and Betty Brooks easily accepted the idea that the case was now newly open; for them it had never closed. The couple had been interviewed by the Falls Township police fourteen years earlier, but were pleased Sergeant Cloud wanted to talk to them.

Sergeant Cloud explained that he was new to the case and starting over. He had hundreds of pieces of old evidence, a thick case file, Walter’s profile, and not much else.